There was an odd situation where some of the systems were unable to make connections to other systems ....some largish distance away. It was fairly variable, but some systems were almost always unreachable, and some were occasionally reachable.
Long investigation, but in summary, this happened because the default packet TTL was, for some reason, set to a fairly low value in a minor kernel update. I simply increased that number in the kernel, recompiled, and all of the problems went away.
The style is very reminiscent from The Register's BOFH line of stories (though without the mischieviousness)--now those are mostly fiction, but they're amusing nonetheless...
There was an odd situation where some of the systems were unable to make connections to other systems ....some largish distance away. It was fairly variable, but some systems were almost always unreachable, and some were occasionally reachable.
Long investigation, but in summary, this happened because the default packet TTL was, for some reason, set to a fairly low value in a minor kernel update. I simply increased that number in the kernel, recompiled, and all of the problems went away.